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Here’s a statement that I don’t think will be too contentious, across the ideological spectrum:The American way is to draw sharp distinctions between winners and losers, in order to encourage people to hustle.People on the political left might rephrase

About a week ago, I argued that the Great Inflation of the 1970s was largely a demographic phenomenon. That claim has provoked a lot of debate and rebuttal, in the comment sections of several posts here, and elsewhere in the blogosphere. See Kevin Erdman, Edward

Mark Sandowski (in comments here and here) and Scott Sumner challenge me to support my thesis that inflation is related to demographics with international data. Doing that right would be hard — inflation correlates across borders, as did World War II

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The good guys will always lose if they don’t have the courage to be the good guys.Brad DeLong writesWhy Are the Technocrats of the Center Missing in Action? Robert Rubin disappoints… And it is not just Rubin: all the bipartisan technocrats of the

I enjoyed Matt Yglesias’ suggestion that depressions are merely a technical problem that will go away once the obsolescence of cash eliminates the zero lower bound on interest rates, and Ryan Avent’s rejoinder. Although I’ve toyed with Yglesias’

Simon Johnson and James Kwak are absolutely right. Sure, “hard” capital and solvency constraints for big banks are better than mealy-mouthed technocratic flexibility. But absent much deeper reforms, totemic leverage restrictions will not meaningfully

"Up through the 1970s, the percentage of non-elderly Americans with insurance from employers had risen steadily. But it stagnated after that and, after another two decades, started to fallfrom a peak of 70.3 percent in 2000 to 63.7 percent in 2008 and then,